I feel like I’ve observed a reverence which, if I’m not careful, I could easily offend with the casualness of which I speak of her, especially as our wound.

My understanding of energies like this is as fields or matrices of energy which make up the natural world. This energy is both “inside” and “outside” of us, as we are just a cell of everything, and all things are made of the same stuffs.

Gods/deities/orisha/etc are forces of nature personified for human access and relatability. They are resonance portals. Meaning, by attuning ourselves to their nature/energy, we *become* them. This is what it originally meant to “worship.” To become.

We can look to Jung’s psychological archetypes to apply this in a “scientific” framework, if that helps. Or to Campbell if we need help understanding the common threads of world Mythology and its Power.

Lilith is the part of the human psyche, of which everything is also made up, which is the wounded Feminine. She is the rejected, the raped, for her refusal to submit, for standing in her power as woman.

We Western women hear that and love her! We see a hero. A saint, even! Resist The Man!

This is the only perspective that we have of Lilith, because this is the lens through which she came into the human psyche. As I understand it, our earliest records are from Judaism, which was already an extremely patriarchal culture.

But when we pull our lens back and step a bit out of our Western-centric perspective, if we take a peek at how we got here in the first place, we can see that Lilith is an evolved expression of an earlier energy known as Osun.

We can easily lay a map of the Orisha aside any Greek, Roman, or Egyptian (etc) Pantheon and see where the understanding of this energy, the energy of Feminine Sexuality, is rooted.

Lilith is a cultural perception, embedded now into the human psyche, of women as being demonized for standing in our sexual power–the damned, the persecuted, banished from the Garden.

But there was something before the demonization, and this is an important thing for Western women to recognize. The beginning of women is not damnation!

And not only that, there are still living maps to help us Remember who we are and who we were *before* the demonization. We will find these maps in pre-patriarchal cultures.

Unfortunately, even by the time these understandings (which are now praised and credited to Western intellects) reached Egypt, they were filtered through misogyny.

How can we use these models as Guides for who we are and how to be our best selves?

If these energy bodies are resonance portals, we must be mindful of what we “worship,” or wish to become. Lilith should not be demonized, she must be healed with love. She represents the wounded aspect of Feminine Sexuality and Motherhood. She is the us who has forgotten our Magic because the religion of the land deems it evil, deems us evil, and yet wishes to harvest and employ our Magic (Sexuality) for their gain (advertising, social control, legal control, etc).

We must heal Lilith.

But this will be done in the Reclamation of our Sexuality, not in the reverence for our wounds (the product of our victim experience) as who we are.

Our trauma speaks to us so we will heal it. Osun can help us Remember the Magic that is Feminine Sexuality as Sacred Medicine, because she integrated into human consciousness before the shift to patriarchy.

We do not shun the wound, but we do not strive to be it. We recognize it as communication and we heal it with Love (alignment).

I can think of plenty of things I want to be able to do that are not necessarily in my realm of possibility right now: traveling with the casualness you would go to the store; having a full wardrobe of beautiful, ethically produced clothes; eating exclusively the best and highest quality clean foods, or being able to eat at any fancy farm-to-plate restaurant whenever I feel like it (I’m thinking of Terra now for the locals), and more… I can think about these things–all the things I’d enjoy having that I don’t have now, if I choose to…

But usually I don’t. Usually I spend my time playing in a mental loop that is constantly gushing about everything all around me. ‘Omg, I love my life so much!’ ‘Wow–I’m so blessed!’ ‘I love this window!’ ‘I love this blanket!’ ‘I love the peace of waiting in carline for my son!’ ‘These almonds taste like heaven!’ Etc etc. These are the things I focus on instead…even while I’m also aware of those other things I can think of when I choose to.

However, there was a time when I thought that if I were content with my conditions, I wouldn’t feel the compulsion to keep pushing forward. I thought it would kill my motivation and my growth would stagnate. (Yep, I thought that…) On the other end, I’d learned that we attract what we feel and think about most consistently and most intensely. This read as a contradiction to me that I couldn’t quite reconcile, which basically kept me captive as my own worst enemy.

But there is a straddle here, one I’ve been dancing for the last 18 months or so, since I made the conscious decision to rewire my brain to focus on all the amazing things around me, rather than dwelling on the fact that I was a single mother with a painfully tiny support system struggling to keep her job while battling severe and disabling PTSD from the most tragic year I had ever experienced.

My mental tapes didn’t always sound the way they do now, and if they ever did resemble those sentiments, it was contrived and forced…ie lying to myself. But once I made that conscious choice to re-focus on what I was genuinely grateful for, as consistently as possible, no matter how small, the default patterns of my brain (which are literally structural “wiring”) shifted so that now I get to spend my days splashing around in my own mental waterpark, constantly inspired with badass ideas and cracking myself up with my hilarious comic talent! (I seriously crack myself up, you guys…)

While it can be a challenge to be grateful for what we perceive to be lacking, finding all these little things all around us that we are grateful for is the bridge between present undesired conditions and living life on our own terms.

The beauty is that as we create new mental networks, we no longer have to put effort into focusing on the awesomeness; that’s just what we see most prominently, and our world shifts accordingly as we draw in more and more experiences that are aligned with everything our thoughts perpetuate.

As what I’d told my friend hit me today, I realized that this is it: the magic happens when we marry gratitude and desire. In this space, we dance the line of gratitude for our current experience while creating excitement around our desires, rather than feeling as if that desire represents a lack.

And if we want to get really powerful and playful (as I know you all really want deep inside, even if you’re a little shy to admit it), we can even think in terms of getting turned on by this desire, this anticipation of what’s coming next, all the while exploding in constant mental orgasm over everything around us, for this “sexual energy” is LIFE FORCE energy, and when we learn to cultivate and harness it, well…then YOU become the Wand, my Love. <3

Too Comfortable

I know that heat is like…the most expensive thing. Folks in the Midwest understand how careful we have to be with our energy use if we want to be able to still pay our mortgage… (I always said I will know true financial Arrival when I can have a warm living space all year ’round.)

The other day I was feeling warm and I thought to myself, this can’t be right. I feel too comfortable, something must be wrong. I will have to go and turn down the thermostat.

The thermostat was fine. But still, there was a small part of me that felt slightly guilty or like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be…because I was too comfortable.

Then it hit me.

This is what I’d been doing in the last few months or so of my life. I felt things were so good, they were too good to be true. The pangs and flashes of sudden tragedy came to balance the comfort… This is too good. This can’t be real. This can’t last.

This time around I knew better than to act on or let it get the best of me…but it has not always been that way. When I realized that Nathan is my Life Partner, I spent six months trying to sabotage our relationship in my disbelief…arguably one of the best and most transformative things that’s ever “happened to me”: alignment with my Divine Soul Partner. And thank god for the strength of our bond because I could have lost it all…seemingly stumbled onto everything I’d asked for and then lost it in my fear that it couldn’t be real….

None of this was conscious, of course. But that little experience with the heat yesterday brought it all into light. How much do we sweat over feelings of things being “too good to be true,” or riddled in fear that something will pull it out from under us at any moment and waste away the miracle by bracing ourselves for tragedy?

I’m learning to let down these guards and relax into my comfort, my happiness, my success. I’m learning to expect it and to embrace it as who I am and not something that slips in and out of my life unpredictably and elusively. Because, afterall, what good are our good experiences if we spend them in worry and fear?